Ministry prepares for clean, strong public admin system

HA NOI (VNS)— The Ministry of Home Affairs will add a new tool to its armoury for measuring administrative reform progress next month, when it releases the Public Administration Reform (PAR) index.

Speaking at the annual public administration forum held by the Ministry and the United Nations Development Program yesterday, Deputy Minister of Home Affairs Nguyen Tien Dinh said the goal of the index, which will measure reform progresss for 2011-20, is to build a "clean and strong" public administration system.

Since 2011, the PAR index has been piloted at three ministries and six provinces, where it has provided newly-developed criteria and indicators separately at both ministry and provincial level.

The scoring of the index at the local level also uses surveys to take into account the opinions of citizens and enterprises.

"As we all know, what does not get measured, might not improve," said UNDP Country Director Louise Chamberlain. "(PAR index) provides a voice for citizens, on the quality of services they get and their overall satisfaction with administrative agencies."

The PAR Index monitors and evaluates public administration reform performance within ministries and provincial governments, letting clients (i.e. the general public) assess these reform efforts.

During the decade-long PAR program, efforts will also focus on areas such as the quality of civil servants and public officers, institutional reform and administration modernisation.

According to Dinh Duy Hoa, general director of the Ministry of Home Affairs' Public Administration Reform, the ministry will also push forward for ministries and localities to design a mechanism that evaluates civil servants based on their work performance by 2013.

Besides PAR Index, there are two other tools used to measure public administrative reforms: Provincial Competitiveness Index, which includes the views of businesses and the private sector, and the Public Administrative Performance Index, which measures the experiences of citizens when interacting with public officials. — VNS